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Finance Leases: A Hidden Channel of China’s Shadow Banking System
Jinfan Zhang, Ting Yang, Yanping Shi, Nov 11, 2020We find that banks use their affiliated leasing firms to provide credit to constrained clients in order to circumvent the government’s targeted monetary tightening policy, which offsets the expected decline in traditional bank loans in overcapacity industries and hampers the effectiveness of the monetary policy. Although this regulatory arbitrage may cause systemic risk at the macro level, bank-affiliated leasing firms...
The Impact of Health Insurance on the Wellbeing of Older Chinese
Sisi Yang, Katja Hanewald, Aug 12, 2020Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015, we analyze whether the universal health insurance system in China increases the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults and to what extent the type of health insurance affects their life satisfaction. We find that the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults does not depend on having any health insurance...
Verifying China’s COVID-19 Recovery Using the FRBSF China CAT
Remy Beauregard, John G. Fernald, Mark M. Spiegel, Dec 23, 2020Using the FRBSF China Cyclical Activity Tracker, we confirm the robustness of China’s recovery from the COVID-19 downturn. The FRBSF “China CAT” estimates that first quarter 2020 China GDP plunged 6.4 standard deviations below its detrended level a year earlier, but by the end of the third quarter, China economic activity had recovered to only 0.1 standard deviations below trend. As such, the FRBSF China CAT index validates the accuracy...
Going Bankrupt in China
Bo Li, Jacopo Ponticelli, Aug 26, 2020We use a new case-level dataset to document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the introduction of specialized courts across Chinese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. We find that specialized courts hire better-trained judges and are 35% faster at dealing with bankruptcy cases than civil courts within the same city. We also find evidence that their introduction benefited the local economy by fostering firm entry, increasing average capital productivity, and favoring the reallocation of employment out of "zombie" firm–intensive sectors.
Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?
Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...
